- How often
- Every session, before anything else.
- How long
- Ten seconds if you set up storage properly during the one time tasks.
- What it prevents
- Arriving at a retired address, a near miss, or something somebody handed you.
- If you skip it
- You are working from memory, a bookmark or a message, all of which rot without telling you.
- How you notice you stopped
- You start typing the beginning of an address and letting autocomplete finish it.
Where it should come from
A file you control, with the date beside each entry. Not memory, because nobody recalls fifty six characters and near enough is precisely the failure being exploited. Not a browser bookmark, because it hides the string behind a name you chose and removes the moment you would have noticed a change.
A link somebody sent you
Treat where it came from as carrying no information at all. A link from a forum you have read for years, a person you trust, or a site that has been right before is exactly as unverified as one from a stranger.
Not because those sources are dishonest. Because none of them can prove anything about an address, and the thing that can takes under a minute at the other end.
Copy, never retype
Every manual transcription is a chance to introduce an error that will look exactly like an attack when it fails, and it costs you the certainty that would have made the next task unnecessary. Copying also means the string that reaches the address bar is the string you chose, which matters for the check on the next page.